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MRIs cause disc bulges

24 August 2026
Adarsh Gopal

The itch to correlate.

The compulsive need to link things that aren't linked. It produces enormous noise and debate that goes nowhere.

Age and experience make this worse, not better. People believe they've seen things. That they can discern patterns. Most of it is hokum. People coaxing out certainty, a neat explanation, a causation, where none exists.

My favourite version of this: pain attributed to weakness, instability, compensation. Something incredibly specific. Your left hip isn't firing, that's why your knee hurts. Delivered with total confidence and authority.

Reality is messier. Might be years of one pattern. Might be poor recovery. Might be someone who lives in one position far too much. Might be someone who is simply sensitive to pain. Because sensitivity sits on a spectrum. Some accept it readily. Others go looking for it, and find it where it has no cause to exist.

Which brings me to the thing I've said to clients a hundred times.

MRIs cause disc bulges.

Scan a room full of people with no pain whatsoever and a large share of them light up. Bulges, tears, degeneration. Wear accumulates as you age. Not all of it presents as pain or incapacity.

Most injuries, most medical outcomes, most training outcomes are a messy amalgam. Genetics. The people around you. Recovery. Sleep. Nutrition. Lifestyle. Environment. Training status. Response to training. Stress. And a brain that perceives a zillion things and nudges you to respond to all of them. Let it all weigh you down and it paralyses you. And paralysis creeps and becomes a habit. Do less, become capable of less, hurt more.

Earphones in. Drown out the explanations. Find a way to move, and keep moving. Move enough and the confidence arrives on its own. It usually does.

There are exceptions. But this works far more often than you'd imagine.


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